Spare a thought for Admin

My company has recently re-organised. Aside from my usual gripes about this one of the actions involved in this re-org was seemingly to chop a whole load of admin staff, including our admin person.

I seriously feel like an 18 year old on my first day away from home at uni and I think others feel the same. Suddenly there's a whole load of small, almost minor looking tasks that won't get done.

Now, my wife works in admin, and she does complain about how under-appreciated admin staff are and how little people know what they actually do. But basically, your admin staff keep things running, they file stuff so engineers can get on with engineering, they organise things, they process data and well, like their name suggests, they administer. However in the usual short sighted way managers with their own PAs think, they don't understand what admin do, so therefore it must be unimportant.

So, Admin staff out there, I salute you.

Bikes and Trains

This is a tough one for the commuter. See I have no real objection to people cycling to and from the station at each end, provided Lycra is only worn by attractive women cyclists. Thing is I really don't like bikes on my trains.

This is mostly because the majority of trains that run on my routes have no space for a bike and the cyclist ends up clogging up the vestibules. Not ideal. The obvious solution would be to put cycle spaces on to trains, but I kind of object to that too since a bike takes up the space that could allow 2 people to sit. Its a conundrum.

Of course Scotrail don't make life easy. I considered trying to cycle to the station from my flat but I neither wanted to lug my bike all the way to work on the train nor leave it chained to something as entertainment for local vandals so I decided to try and rent one of the cycle lockers at my local station. I picked up a leaflet and filled in the details, however as it transpires rental of the lockers is not dealt with at the station, no I would have to travel to head office in Glasgow to hand in my form, obviously only during office hours. This is about the worst way they could have organised this, surely it makes the most sense for me to apply through my local station since I'm there every day and that's where the locker is located. I have decided this means that Scotrail don't really want people using the lockers, this might mean they could be called successful and they may have to invest in more.

Back to bikes on trains, its really part of a larger problem, where a designer and a bean counter get together and commit hideous acts of short-sightedness. Trains now have less luggage space than ever before, with Virgin's pendolino's being the worst, the overhead storage isn't even big enough to take a small rucksack. In Short people have got together and made something that looks pretty and holds loads of people, but neglected to consider that the same people may want to carry things with them, particularly on a Glasgow-London trip. My solution, on local trains just a bit of thought for things like between seat storage for luggage, perhaps even take some dead space and make it a luggage rack. on longer distance, a guards van, yes, a car devoted entirely to luggage, I hear accountants shudder as I type but think of it. As you board you have to check in any larger bags (possibly at cost) where they are labeled with your destination and transfers, someone is then employed to load and offload this carriage at the specified points. Its not flawless but could solve most of the problems.

Ms Marvel Annual

I have been picking up the Ms. Marvel title since it started in the wake of House of M and has been consistently entertaining. However I was sorely disappointed by the Ms. Marvel annual in this weeks pull list.

The story wasn't bad, the art wasn't my cup of tea, but here's my gripe. It was distinctly short of Ms Marvel. Now I checked, It said Ms. Marvel on the cover, and only Ms. Marvel, ok it had a picture of her and Spider-Man on it, but I would expect a story with Ms. Marvel featuring Spider-Man. What I got was a Spider-Man story featuring Ms. Marvel. It wasn't a bad story, but if you look at what I buy you see I pick up Ms Marvel's solo titles while the only spidey a see is in New Avengers. If it had been called Spider-Man annual featuring Ms Marvel, I'd have left it on the shelf. Yes, I feel I was mis-sold, the issue had absolutely nothing for the Ms Marvel readers, Spidey got all the good lines and the bloody narrative of the story, Marvel turns up, tries to arrest him for being unregistered, then they fight a baddy. Looking at the issue spidey is on just about every page while Marvel barely features.

So, if you don't care about Spider-Man, and follow Ms. Marvel, avoid the Annual. I'm off to complain to Marvel for false advertising.

Oh Discordia

Woe, woe is me, for my computer suffered a fatal death, the hal.dll file more or less said "You know I can't do that Dave" and packed up. It coudl just be corrupted, or it coudl be that my hard drive is dead.

My test will be to get an Ubuntu cd running and boot into that, if I can see my hard drive, I can try copying a new hal.dll file into place, if not it will mean its dead, gone my large selection of fictional military logos.

Still, 2 things I can take from this.

1. Back up everything regularly
2. Have an Ubuntu CD on standby for this sort of thing.

Beery Goodness

Summer is officially over.

The Houston Brewing company's second festival of the year usually marks this and indeed it was its usual random self, with rides for children, a random band and, as usual lovely weather until around 5. Selection of beers wasn't great but they had a real cider on.

Which made me think about Beer, obviously. Now by Beer I mean Ale, or a lager, but none of your Tetleys, none of your Carling, or Tennents, in short if its chemically stabilised and accelerated, leave it out.

Now in Scotland Ale isn't always an easy find, although with the propagation of bottled ales it is becoming easier for pubs to make a shout on it, and the popularity of Good quality European biers is putting some pressure on the lager market (As can be seen by the way the usual big players are bringing out "Luxury" brands and trying to play up their own less chemical origins) however I won't believe them until they are forced by law to print an ingredients list on the side.

So, how do you tell a real ale from commercial swill. Well, its not 100% but a good way to tell if anything is good, is if its being sold, or marketed ice cold, be it Magners over ice or Ice cold Carling there is only one reason to serve anything below zero and that is to numb the taste buds to mask the taste. Not that ale should be served warm, despite what Americans will tell you, it should be cellar temperature, or a few degrees off normal room temperature, like it was in a room where you'd consider a jumper.

Still, it was good to be on the real ale again and with the rise of beer geekism and snobbery hopefully they should become more prevalent as places try to look more cosmopolitan.

Well I'll be damned

Looking at the CBR boards I've seen a preview of #5 of ultimate Iron Man II.

I thought this finished, was the series really so dull that I forgot it was still running.

Doesn't really bode well for it eh? I suppose its kind of obsolete now I can get my War Machine fix from Initiative, oh and Iron Man, and his own solo title coming soon.

I don't know what went wrong with Ultimate Iron Man. Well actually I do. The Idea was flawed to begin with. Seriously, and this goes for the Iron Man animated series too. I'll map it out.

I don't want to see a kid Tony Stark. I don't want to see him running around with Kid Jim Rhodes and having adventures against Kid Obidiah Stane. It interests me.... Not a jot.

Its a shame because the actual grown up incarnation of Ultimate Iron Man was great, his armour was more of a weapons platform with a 50 strong support team but the partying sarky drunkard was fun to read.

Shame actually because with this and the heap of offensive dung Ultimates has become, the Ultimate line is no longer something you can recommend off the bat to people.

Still, for my Iron Man fix all is not lost. The latest story in the Iron Man: Director of SHIELD title has ended, and was pretty good. Much more on form than the previous stories, although actually getting issues out has helped. And of course the next story is the War Machine arc. How to win over Pie Man in one easy move. In fact both main Iron man titles are good, and I'm hoping that with his current foe in Invincible being Ezekiel Stane we may get an appearance by The Order. Finally we actually got a second issue of Viva Las Vegas, the Faverau penned movie continuity story. Its slow because of the CG art but had some brilliant shameless flirting with Elsa bloodstone.

SO, and it may be a first, if you want to read Iron Man, don't read ultimate.

Cost of travelling

Well, despite widespread protests, huge petitions and generally the public screaming a big fat NO!, road pricing schemes. This is an expensive system that uses GPS and a satellite receiver in every car to track when, where and how long you are using your car. Now we already have a great system of pricing journeys per mile that even rewards fuel efficiency, its called fuel tax, but this won't use oodles of contractable technology (Should be worth a directorship in the company after you leave politics eh?) and of course doesn't allow charging depending on what road you use at what time, so if you use some farm track at 3am, it will be really cheap, on the other hand if you use the M8 at rush hour, boy will the cost rack up. This all goes with the strange opinion that those in power have that we all take to the main roads, and indeed swamp all forms of public transport between around 7-9am and 4-6pm because we like causing congestion.

Now we've also had an announcement from Scotrail that fares are going to rise 6%, the maximum they can. Do we get newer or longer trains, or a more frequent service, well no. But they are allowed to raise fares 6% and unsurprisingly that's what they've done. Some rail firms have also expressed an interest in making peak time fares more expensive in order to "Reduce overcrowding on trains" because when I'm off work I often decide to take the train in with the commuters for the company as opposed to waiting till 10 when its quiet.

No, all these systems are revenue raising in the oldest traditions of capitalism. More people want to use trains in the rush hours, and so as a result you can get more money from them. Indeed our trains are already monumentally overpriced and I would start enforcing fare reductions without service or rolling stock cuts, and if that means no one wants the franchise then you can re-nationalise without too much hassle. Of course if you were a shareholder in First you may complain but we need cheap and efficient public transport and at the moment nationalisation or not for profit companies similar to Network Rail seem to be the way forward.

As for cars, well the government has clearly realised that there is more money to be squeezed from the motorist of we can charge them more for using the roads at rush hour rather than just charging for the fuel they burn. Of course a side effect of this will be the migration of rush hour traffic from the expensive motorways and by-passes to back roads and villages, increasing road deaths, noise problems for residents and pollution from stop/start motoring. Yes its folly in the extreme but as Blair said when he received the petition "We know best"